The fact of the matter is that almost any hardware you buy is overkill for any given application in a development function. Even chroot is a primitive form of virtualization. You talk of incompetent sysadmins reverting their mistakes, but what of the mistakes of others? While the distinction and processes between "production" and "development" are made on a company wide basis, the development teams don't have the time or money to spend on production environments, but if their development environments go down then they cry just like any production level environment would. You have thousands of developers waiting for an environment to come back up? What is the cost to the company? The company will see that as a lot of money going down the drain, even if it's labeled "development'. Virtualization gives me the ability to maintain development levels of flexibility and production levels of stability. So yes that strange fantasy that "this shit is going to fly" is not only my job, it's what the Fortune 15 company that employs me expects of our environment.

Virtualization in any real scale is a cluster. HPC is a cluster. There's no need to cluster a cluster, it's pointless. Virtualization has no business in HPC, but in almost every other computing aspect it makes real sense. Especially in a world where whatever server you buy uses a small percent of the processing power that it's capable of over almost any given timeframe. Most apps or scenarios are "bursty", and that is where virtualization if done right can really excel.

While networking in general represents one of the last things to be widely virtualized, it also represents one of the next big jumps in virtualization. Juniper, Xsigo, Nicira and a whole host of companies would beg to differ with your conclusion. In fact they're betting large sums of money that you're wrong.

Luckily for my area there are stores like JB Saunders to fill the void that Radio Shack left long ago. From now on I go out of my way to give them business in order to help foster a local business community. Plus they have boatloads of ridiculously useful stuff anytime I need it and I don't have to spend a ridiculous amount of money for an overpriced HDMI/USB3.0/whatever cable when I need it.

There are many things besides the diet of the animal that can cause venison/elk/whatever to taste gamey. Quickly killing a healthy animal, bleeding gutting and skinning as quickly as possible will most of the time prevent a "gamey" taste regardless of what the animal eats and where it is caught.

Just look at all the "innovation" that companies like Enron brought to a deregulated energy market! Let's ask California how well that worked out for the average consumer. While we're at it we can look at deregulatory laws like the Commodity Futures Modernization Act and the repeal of Glass-Steagal that enabled such "innovation". The "free market" for oil is now run by speculators who can buy and sell contracts for millions of barrels of oil but never have to take delivery, creating false demand and squeezing millions of dollars a day from average americans as they have to pay over $3.00/gal to fuel their vehicles. What else has deregulation done? How about all those nasty little unregulated derivatives such as MBS(mortgage backed securities) that imploded the world economy? That's financial "innovation" like the world had never seen before. All thanks to deregulation, yay!

I call bullshit on Fran. I work with OEL and RHEL everyday at work. I have done a bunch of installs of RAC on both platforms over many years and support many clusters both in house and at customer sites. There is hardly a difference between the two distro's at all... the main difference is some tweaked entries in/etc/sysctl.conf and their "custom" kernel, which will more than likely turn out to be a tool they use to lock you in to their hardware/software stack even more. Oracle software itself isn't terrible, RAC is a nice, speedy database but as a company they're despicable. Before we made the giant, multi-billion dollar enterprise wide switch to OEL, they blamed any issue on RHEL even when RHEL support could prove it was Oracle's code that was fubar. Literally a day after the contract is signed... "oh yeah, there's a problem with our software code, it wasn't a RHEL problem after all... sorry about that, here's the fix". Even to this day with all their supposed hacking of their kernel and uber-custom sysctl.conf entry, they still blame every goddamn problem that we or a customer has on something else... hardware, network, the moons gravitational pull, etc... Their support is atrocious, filled with people who have no interest in actually fixing your problems and quite frankly are well... idiots. If I ever have a hand in any future business decisions for my current company or any other company I ever work for, I will always vehemently recommend against Oracle because their business model is a nasty mix of vendor hardware/software stack lock-in and extortion.

Fuck Oracle. At least RedHat appreciates your business, is uber-helpful if you do have a problem and really quick to fix things if you can prove to them through kernel dumps or some other means that the OS is having an issue.

Exchanges make boatloads of money off of High Frequency Traders(HFT). While their algorithm mows through a ton of investors stops, causing thousands of people to lose money, their algorithm gets the benefit of the doubt as any trade after a certain percentage swing gets nullified by the exchanges. In short, they get play by different rules then other investors. The easiest way to stop all this HFT flash crash shenanigans is to declare all trades of a freaked out algo valid. Then the people responsible for that algo lose tons of cash, as they rightfully should. That loss should incentivize banks and their programmers from writing shitty programs that freak out the markets. As it stands right now the banks and their algos have a win win situation. They get to make millions when their algos work but when their algo's freak out, the exchange gets to declare the trades invalid. Make the trades the algo makes completely valid and I guarantee you won't see algos freaking out as often.

Without a doubt, at an absolute minimum, thousands of innocent people/families have paid for the arrogance of the United States as a pre-emptive aggressor that starts and continues unjust wars for years and years.

There... fixed that for you.

Why is collateral damage acceptable when it's justified by the war machine, but not acceptable because of the leaks that wikileaks published? WIkileaks does much more to preserve our true freedom then the Military Industrial Complex and 1 TRILLION/YR in defense spending will ever do.

Rupert Murdoch is an idiot who represents an industry that is slow to adapt to the new media culture. Plus the fact that he's a total right wing shill, I really have to take everything coming out of news corp with an enormous grain of salt.

A great read on team owners and how they get cities to publicly subsidize their investments via stadiums is "Field of Schemes: How the great stadium swindle turns public money into private profit" If I remember correctly one of the big problems is that there is federal legislation that prevents muni's from profiting in certain ways off of such deals, which makes the team owners the defacto profiteers in the whole shebang. This is the biggest problem that I have with modern sports. I'd be refreshing to see more muni's that actually own the teams, such as the Green Bay Packers. I'm not against subsidizing sports, but I am against it when it becomes just another mass of public money going into private pockets.